Tag Archives: Wal-Mart

It’s time to look beyond technical price movements, earnings estimates, or analyst opinions. The reconciliation between cash flows and valuations has arrived. The market is beginning to distinguish between those companies that earn a quality ROIC and those that do not.

What do these companies have in common? They are the only surviving S&P 500 stocks to rise 10% or more in 2008. In the midst of a collapsing market and the subsequent damage, these seven stocks made good money for investors.

Don’t get burned buying a stock without business operations that cannot support the dividend. Chasing yield could leave you holding the bag once dividends get cut and share prices fall. Find out how to avoid these traps in this week’s webinar “ How To Avoid Dividend Traps.”

At the beginning of the fourth quarter of 2015, only the Consumer Staples sector earns an Attractive-or-better rating. Our sector ratings are based on the aggregation of our fund ratings for every ETF and mutual fund in each sector.

Retailers have been under attack in recent years but not by the online competitors that may first come to mind. Instead, retailers have been under attack from Wall Street analysts who can’t wait to bury the next traditional retail business.

Amazon (AMZN: $356/share) filed its annual Form 10-K last week. Our analysts have picked through the financial footnotes and fine print. 2013 results reinforce my bearish thesis from May of 2013 that AMZN’s valuation implies a more unrealistic level of growth and profitability than investors realize.

Check out my sector overview on Reuters Insider here. The Consumer Staples sector ranks first out of the ten sectors as detailed in my Sector Rankings for ETFs and Mutual Funds report. It gets my Neutral rating, which is based on aggregation of ratings of 10 ETFs and nine mutual funds in the Consumer Staples…

At the beginning of the fourth quarter of 2013, only the Consumer Staples sector earns an Attractive rating. My sector ratings are based on the aggregation of my fund ratings for every ETF and mutual fund in each sector.

The belief that Internet retail is or will be more profitable than traditional retail is untrue. Amazon is in a competitive, low margin business that cannot justify the profit growth implied in its valuation.

When I ran across the recent article “270,033 pages later, a chance to catch our breath…”, I could not help but admire footnoted.org’s marketing moxy.
The article provides a count of the number of pages of 10-K filings that have poured in during the real earnings season. It also highlight a couple of the largest filings. At first glance, it is easy for one to assume that all of the 270,033 pages were also analyzed.

The consumer staples and information technology sectors are tops among the ten major sectors. Both get our “attractive” rating. Our Sector Roadmap report ranks and rates all of the 10 sectors. It also benchmarks all sectors against the S&P 500, which gets our “neutral” rating and the Russell 2000, which gets our “dangerous” rating.